Whatever walks in Hill House walks alone, we are told, right at the start. Eleanor comes alone to Hill House, a repressed woman-child having spent her years caring for her now-dead mother, having to steal the car she half-owns from her sister to answer the invitation of Dr Montague to join him in a scientific investigation of the paranormal, because when she was a child her home was inexplicably bombarded by stones for three days. Also coming are Theodora, unusually sensitive, and Luke, heir to Hill House. Eleanor enters into a sudden little community and becomes part, in her mind, of a new family. She also enters Hill House, an undeniably terrible place with an unpleasant history. Eleanor is very much ambivalent about this, greedily battening on the adventure and the companionship, responding strongly to the inherent terror of Hill House, creating a kind of sympathetic resonance as her repression gives way to a heedless hunger that threatens to unhinge her completely.

I wasn't quite prepared for how funny this was. Jackson uses humour deftly. The characters' dialogue is witty and even extravagant as they cope with the anxieties of their unpleasant and unnerving surroundings with slightly hysterical and over-done jokiness, because these are intelligent modern people deliberately visiting a haunted house to see some ghosts, and this is how they handle the contradictions. Then Mrs Montague arrives, a devoted spiritualist and magnificent comic creation, just as the phenomena reach their peak.

There are supernatural phenomena - though there are also some subtle hints about their source - but the real haunting is Eleanor's mental breakdown into paranoid psychosis, and whether it is she that triggers Hill House or Hill House that triggers her, it is the failure to recognise her condition that brings about the ending.

Funny: but all the more chilling and creepy and scary for it.

...cont'd...

In The Electric Mist is the sixth book in the series, and involves a killer targeting young prostitutes and the discovery of a body from decades before, both of which are somehow connected with a movie shooting in the locality and the gangster who is funding it, a man who went to school with Dave. All the familiar elements of a Robicheaux are there, with the exception of Clete Purcel rolling round like a match searching for a powder keg. Dave debates the nature of good and evil with the spirit of a Confederate general while searching for a killer and wrestling with his own demons of drink and violence, his disgust with the venality and self-interest of people around him threatening to overwhelm his own sense of decency.
I got my first James Lee Burke novel, Heaven's Prisoners, from the Cork City library when I was an impoverished, study-shy 19 year old student, and read it under a hot April sun down by the river on the grounds of the University. His books remain as beautiful and potent and profound as they did when I lost whole days to them beside the Lee, and I don't begrudge a single one.

Iain M Banks went off and wrote a few non-Culture sf books just to prove he could, and what we got was a dazzling, baroque novel about a moribund future Earth about to be swamped by an interstellar dust cloud and the efforts of various parties to activate ancient defense systems which, if they actually exist, may save the day, while the ruling elite for reason of their own, work to thwart these efforts. The book is also notable because fully one third of it is spelled fonetikly, with the result that it's best read in a Scottish accent and probably some sort of literary joke about Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. It's utterly brilliant.

It's funny, because I remember when I read this the first time, all sorts of incomprehension and mistakes jumbled together as I forced my way through. I loved the writing. I loved the writing, the setting, the sci-fi cool, the characters and the three intertwining plots, but in the end I barely had a clue what was going on. The Maas biotech stuff I got, sure, another high-tech maguffin, but the loa and their horses, despite having read Neuromancer and having it all laid out quite clearly in the book itself, I just couldn't work out what they were. The identity of the Boxmaker puzzled me, too. I think I assumed it was some sort of cruel mockery directed at Art and human presumption and pretensions. But Gibson was never anywhere near as cynical as cyberpunk the genre was supposed to be, even though the cynicism of the eighties forms part of the texture of the Sprawl novels. Instead, it is strange and lonely and brave and beautiful. 'My song is of time and distance. The sadness is in you.'

Count Zero is carefully plotted, precision engineered, fine-tuned, sleek and streetwise. Three plots: the mercenary Turner who specialises in corporate defections; Marly the art dealer ruined by scandal in Paris, and Bobby the Count, a would-be cowboy hit by lethal ice on his first run and saved by... something. Their stories turn around subterfuge and betrayal, the all-enveloping power of the monstrously rich and the strange interface of voodoo and cyberspace. It's a wild, thrilling ride, and it's a wonder to me that I can grasp now what eluded me then.

This one I didn't read on my phone, this one I had a real hard paper copy of, so quaint and real, an artifact of a forgotten age. I ALSO had it on my phone, though, and I did read a few chapters that way, torn between the ancient and the modern! What will become of me!

Nothing nice, according to Peter Watts. If we thought things were dark on the bottom of the ocean, we had no idea how inky-black things were going to get back on the surface.

In an effort to destroy a planet-threatening microbe, a nuclear bomb was set off at a deep-sea vent, triggering an earthquake and tsunami that killed millions. It was all for nothing, as Leni Clarke swims ashore on the Colorado coast with vengeance in mind and the Behemoth bug in her blood. Everywhere she goes, death follows on a horrible scale, but not from the bug, from the authorities desperate to sterelise Behemoth out of existence. She becomes a legend, a myth, a messiah, and in the howling wilderness that used to be the internet, she inadvertently causes something unprecedented and incredibly dangerous to evolve.

The scope broadens, from the inky depths to the sprawling continent of North America, as forces marshal to help or hinder Leni on her insane odyssey. This is an epic, action-packed tale of doom and destruction, the very bleeding edge of science fiction. Brilliant.

I have a vague sense that this is the most well-regarded of Gibson's post-Sprawl books, mostly because the Idoru of the title anticipates the current use of virtual pop-stars in Japan, though how well the two things map to each other I don't know. Personally, I think that it's the best novel he's ever written, and he's never written a bad one, not because of his predictive powers but because of a sideways emotional hook at the end. Gibson's smooth polished surface cool resists real depth of empathy. One tends to admire or like his characters than truly care about them. However, my enduring memory of the first time I read this was terrible concern for Chia, vulnerable, innocent, but definitely not stupid, off on her own in the big bad world, but I had forgotten about Zona Rosa, and for once I left a Gibson novel with, as usual, a shimmering brain, but also deeply moved.

Idoru is slightly less Elmore Leonardy than Virtual Light. What it reminded me of, more than anything, was a Richard Stark novel. Like Stark, Gibson never wastes a word, a sentence or even a chapter. Everything is precision-tooled, hand-crafted, old school workmanship. It's lean, taut, tight and fast, all the more admirable for the way it evokes a version of the future and deals with cutting edge ideas of technology and pop-culture and wraps them around the double-braided plot in a trim, elegant and concise thriller.

Sequel to The Atrocity Archive. Uber-geek Bob Howard keeps the Dark Old Gods at bay working as a humble government employee at The Laundry. He's sent to the Caribbean to stop a loony billionaire raising something horrible from the bottom of the ocean. Hi-jinks ensue.

The Darkness That Comes Before by Scott Bakker which is Book One of The Prince Of Nothing, and has so many long, unwieldy titles that I keep forgetting what they are. I did NOT want to get into another multivolume epic fantasy but someone pressed me to it, and, well, it's an odd one. Very well written, quite dense with history, religion, philosophy, it can be heavy going, but he actually handles the complex plots and the characters with a surprising deftness and clarity, while leaving lots of fairly important stuff quite murky. It's unlike Martin, inasmuch is often about the human failings and foibles and even whims that create history, whereas history here is all about titanic forces being manipulated with varying degrees of success by powerful people who are probably all sociopathic monsters willing to sacrifice thousands for their own ends.

Another tough read. A Swedish vampire novel, it again ignores most of the conventions, instead going for the jugular with some profoundly disturbing sexuality combined with merciless social realism. Horrible, horrific and heartbreaking, redeemed only by the touching friendship at its core, this is probably the Iron Dragon’s Daughter of vampire novels. Unromantic, unsexy, uncomfortable and brilliant.

Fans of Martin and Mieville will find the trilogy of which this is the final volume well worth a try. Last Argument rushes relentlessly to its conclusion, with seperate threads of tangled intrigue and spectacular violence. The plot comes neatly, viscously into its own and all the characters, some of whom were damn near likeable by the end of the second volume, start to curdle a little as their true natures come to the fore. The main surprise is that the cynicism is actually slightly less bruising than the battles, of which there are a few, all more or less running together. Nobody gets what they deserve, only one person really gets what he wants and we all get a glimpse of how power is truly exercised. There’s no ambivalence about the ending, though it’s not as bleak or hopeless as it could have been if the author was just being a thoroughgoing bastard purely for the sake of it, which leads me to suppose that though Abercrombie is clear-eyed and honest about cynicism, he is not necessarily himself a cynic. One possible lesson to take from the book is that the only happy cynics are the sociopaths, and they’re the ones to truly watch out for.